'This Real Night' Captures An Era's Lost Innocence

April 7, 1985|By Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

One of our first glimpses of the Aubrey children catches them in the summer light of late Edwardian England, planting hyacinths and tulips in their mother's garden. They remind us of figures in a Sargent painting -- gently romanticized images of youthful innocence, caught in that sweet, lingering moment between childhood and adolescence. Their idyll there, of course, is not to last for long -- not only are each of the Aubreys about to begin their apprenticeship in the grown-up world, but there are already intimations of the coming war, and the hard changes it will bring to their family and to England. Although it can easily be read on its own, This Real Night was written as a sequel to The Fountain Overflows -- Rebecca West's nostalgic novel cum childhood memoir, published in 1956. Night was left virtually completed at the time of Dame Rebecca's death in 1983 -- minor editing on the manuscript was done by her publisher and literary executors -- and it is now being published for the first time. At once the story of a girl's coming of age and a parable of England's initiation into noisy modern history, the novel is part old- fashioned story, part social treatise -- moral (and sometimes moralistic) in tone -- and filled with a curious collection of characters, some of them refugees from a Trollope novel; some from a work by Dickens.

The Aubreys, as readers of The Fountain Overflows already know, belong to England's shabby gentry. While they have barely enough money to replant their garden each spring, they're well-educated and exceedingly cultivated -- even the kids like to insert Latin into a conversation -- and they cling to the Victorian belief that ''the world was full of opportunities, and one required vigor to seize them, and if one seized them, one would be all right.''

The twins, Rose and Mary, are to become concert pianists, like their famous mother. Their sister Cordelia -- an obnoxious prig who is forever laying her moral bigotries on others -- will make a successful social marriage. And their brilliant brother, Richard Quin, will go on to Oxford and become a poet.

Indeed the Aubreys appear to lead a nice, jolly -- and to modern eyes, remarkably quaint -- existence. They make family excursions to a charming little inn called the Dog and Duck, peopled by pleasantly boisterous characters like Uncle Len, a former jockey; and they pass long afternoons, debating such matters as whether people are ''good and bad because they are born like that'' or whether ''they are good and bad because they choose to be.'' The narrator spends most of her free time practicing arpeggios and scales, and relates practically everything that happens to her to things she's read -- Grimm's Fairy Tales, perhaps, or maybe, the Greek tragedies.

Over this warm, hermetic domain presides Clare, the Aubrey children's mother -- a matriarch so saintly and stoic (she's described as ''an eagle plagued by a conscience'') that she often seems unreal. When her son suggests that a friend's nasty wife may possibly harbor competitive feelings, Clare replies, ''People are not like that in real life, only in Punch jokes.''

Apparently Clare's husband was a gambler and a cad who ran off years ago, leaving her with only marginal resources; but strong woman that she is, she has persevered, and forged a happy family. In fact, as viewed through the lens of Dame Rebecca's feminist ideology, Clare comes to stand for all the happy, nurturing values of the female spirit. And as the novel proceeds, the private world of creativity and beauty that she has manufactured for her children will stand in sharper and sharper contrast to what the author sees as the violent, male-dominated world of public events.

Change seeps into the Aubreys' lives, insidiously at first -- part of the natural process of growing up; later, it rushes in with the accelerating force of history. The children learn of their absent father's death, the murder of a friend's father. They are exposed to illness and divorce, the disappointments of a career that fails to trace its expected arc, the costs exacted by one that demands total commitment.

''The world was going to destroy me, just as I had always feared,'' thinks Rose, after her piano teacher tells her that she lacks adequate technique. ''There was nothing before me but to gasp and die.''

For Richard Quin, the future, which had once seemed to run in a straight, bright line to the horizon, now seems even dimmer. This young man, delineated by Dame Rebecca in such glowing terms as to resemble a deified Rupert Brooke -- his charm, beauty and talent enable him to live in a ''private golden age . . . where there were neither strangers nor trespassers, only friends and open doors'' -- is summoned by the war. And as they watch him go off to his death, his sisters realize, somewhat melodramatically, that they are all being ''whirled to disaster by the turning earth.''

''Our careers for some time continued,'' recalls Rose. ''The First World War did not suddenly turn on civil life and strangle it as the Second did. Simply we saw a fungoid bloom of ruin slowly creep across the familiar objects among which we had been reared.''